A dad in Ostego, Michigan—population 3,956—terrified parents, police, and school administrators by handing out teddy bears to people he passed on the street, including children in the presence of adults. It was Ken Cronkhite's attempt to spread some happiness and help his 89-year-old father, the owner of an 800-teddy bear collection, to downsize. And it backfired. As news spread of a man, a plan, and his plush toys, the police department's phone lines lit up. Officers sped off to patrol the bus stops as at least one frantic mom ripped apart her kid's bear to see if it contained something...

A 3-day-old baby was fatally mauled by a pet dog in front of the child's parents at their Mira Mesa home Thursday night, San Diego police said Friday. The parents were in bed, watching TV, with their newborn son and pit bull-mix dog when the mother coughed, startling the dog, child abuse unit Sgt. Tu Nguyen said. The dog reacted by biting the baby, he said. The parents pulled the animal off and raced the child to a hospital, where he was declared dead.

(CNSNews.com) - White House Science Advisor John Holdren says because of the impacts of climate change, agricultural and construction workers “will basically be unable to control their body temperature and will die.” “In some parts of the world, when you look more broadly at this question, you see the likelihood that in the hottest times of the year it will be simply physiologically impossible to work outdoors,” Holdren said at a White House event on climate change Monday. “That means agriculture, that means construction, people who try to work outdoors will basically be unable to control their body temperature and...

The clock has run out on the climate change debate. It's time for predictions to give way to radical action.For most of my career, I've been a trend spotter, sometimes referred to as a futurist. I've divined trends for companies seeking to innovate; anticipated consumer appetites; and kept pioneering brands ahead of the pack. My work has been a passion, a calling, never just a job. So, it was fundamentally disorienting when I realized recently, I'd lost my feeling for the future.Gradually, over a period of I don't know how long -- months? -- my usually strong connection with intuition...

A grass-roots offshoot of a progressive, “social changemaker” nonprofit is petitioning newspapers and other media to begin referring to climate change skeptics as “deniers” by default. Forecast the Facts, a climate change activism project of a larger nonprofit called the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, argues that media types who use the general term “skeptics” are “misleading the public” on climate change: Some members of the media are still misleading the public by wrongly using the term “skeptic.” The New York Times, for example, recently called Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) a skeptic — even though he believes that climate change is “the...

Do You Fear the Right Thing? Letâ€™s See â€¦ A Meditation on the Story of Chicken Little By: Msgr. Charles PopeFear is a very complex passion. On the one hand, there are things that we ought rightly to fear such as grave physical and spiritual dangers. The fearÂ of being near the edge of a cliff might well save our life. The fearÂ of serious sin and the punishment we might experience or the offenseÂ to God (who loves us) is appropriateÂ and holy. Sadly, more people lack this holy fear rooted in the possible loss of what is most precious to us:...

Colorado parents are being told to be on the lookout this Halloween for marijuana-laced candy, NBC News reported. The Facebook page of the Denver Police Department is warning that mass-produced candy can by sprayed with hash oil, and once the spray dries, there is no way to tell that the candy has been infused. The station reported that the Denver PD Facebook page features Patrick Johnson, owner of marijuana shop Urban Dispensary. In the film, Johnson urges parents to inspect any candy their children bring home after trick-or-treating on Halloween to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with..

More proof that the women's magazines are all in the tank for the Democrats arrives in the October issue of Vogue magazine (edited by major DNC donor Anna Wintour). After all the fashion ads comes a gooey story on Secretary of State John Kerry. Writer Sally Hansen keeps bringing the reader back around to Kerry’s (very brief) service in Vietnam, reminding some of James Taranto’s 2004 gibe mocking Kerry’s milking of his war resume: “the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.”

Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last. This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the planet. Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem, legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response, President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities, which some scientists warn may be too little, too late. Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may be the frequent...

Details emerging from a meeting held last month in Venezuela provide some rare insight into the actual mission of numerous groups that purportedly exist to stop the ostensible dangers of global warming. According to reports, the United Nations sponsored the four-day event, which was attended by representatives from 130 environmentalist groups. While the end result was a lengthy report providing an overview of the alliance’s proposals, the basic message can be summed up in two words: end capitalism. Fellowship of the Minds provided its analysis of the Spanish language document published after the meeting ended July 18. According to the...

One of the world's largest food companies says it's about to take a big bite out of global warming. General Mills, maker of Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Wheaties, said Monday that it will set a target to limit air pollution throughout its entire supply chain next summer. This marks the first time the food giant has pledged to measurably rein in greenhouse-gas emissions from its agricultural suppliers of ingredients like soy and sugarcane. Environmental watchdogs say the effort is significant. According to Oxfam, air pollution created by the agricultural industry makes up a quarter of total greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide....

Some climate change proponents are saying the huge amounts of methane gas, stored under the Arctic ice is a potential "ticking time bomb." They claim that we must stop extracting fossil fuels that put more CO2 into our atmosphere or face disaster. Methane is only one of a number of gases called greenhouse gases (GHG) that can absorb and emit infrared radiation, or in other words, this means they can trap and absorb heat. The most abundant GHG is water vapor, followed by carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and CFC's. By measuring atmospheric infrared radiation, climatologists are able to...

When one thinks of the warming climate, the phrases that pop into mind probably aren't "nausea and vomiting," "sharp, stabbing pain," and "blood in your urine." Yet these awful symptoms could become more prolific in the coming decades, as hotter weather appears to be linked with the risk of growing a kidney stone. This disheartening prognosis comes from doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and elsewhere who've completed a seven-year-long study of 60,433 patients in several major U.S. cities. When the temperature goes up, there's a subsequent spike in the number of people visiting hospitals for stone issues, they...

Nine out of ten hospital wards may be at risk of overheating, increasing the dangers for vulnerable patients who are left sweltering in temperatures of more than 26C (78.8F), government advisers have warned. Poor ventilation, thin walls, low ceilings and big windows that can barely be opened are contributing to temperatures far exceeding acceptable levels during hot weather, according to the Committee on Climate Change. One fifth of domestic properties could also already be overheating, with flats especially vulnerable, it finds. The number of people dying prematurely from overheating could triple to 7,000 per year by the 2050s as global...

According to the Obama Administration’s newly released National Climate Assessment, climate change is already impacting communities in every corner of the country, with an increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events – storms, floods, and droughts – and rising sea levels destabilizing the everyday lives of Americans. Worse, the impacts of these changes are accelerating, and they are affecting communities around the world. The Pentagon’s most recent Quadrennial Defense Review warns that “climate change may increase the frequency, scale and complexity of future missions.” Some of the least stable states in the world will face changing weather patterns that...

Fighting climate change would help grow the world economy, according to the World Bank, adding up to $2.6tn (Ł1.5tn) a year to global GDP in the coming decades. The findings, made available in a report on Tuesday, offer a sharp contrast with claims by the Australian government that fighting climate change would “clobber” the economy. The report also advances on the work of economists who have argued that it will be far more costly in the long run to delay action on climate change. Instead, Tuesday's report found a number of key policies – none of which included putting an...

Across the edges of the Indian Ocean, the amount of rainfall differs greatly. If it rains particularly hard in the Sumatran rain forest, the already arid region of East Africa is onset with drought. Researchers from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), the California Institute of Technology, the Univerity of Southern California and the University of Bremen found that this cyclic, bipolar climate phenomenon has likely been around for 10,000 years. The pilot study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), sheds light on the climate system of a region whose rainfall patterns have a...

The White House is finally addressing a serious, and misunderstood, problem with a new “bee plan.” The bee plan is a federal strategy to stop the sharp decline of pollinators, most notably bees, and restore pollinator populations to their previous buzzing glory. Can the White House end a problem that has alluded scientists and policy makers for over a decade? The bee plan is focused on habitats… and bureaucracy. The first step of the plan is form a task force. The group will include representatives from 14 major federal departments (click here for the full list).

And while tea party groups and talk radio hosts are celebrating the downfall of a Republican member of Congress who came to symbolize the “establishment,” there are indications that this enthusiasm is misplaced. In the wake of his victory, Brat joined MSNBC host Chuck Todd on Wednesday where he received a gentle grilling and was asked for his position on a variety of policy matters. Brat seemed entirely unprepared to have to speak on issues of substance. In fact, he suggested – perhaps (hopefully) jokingly – that he thought Todd invited him on the program merely to celebrate his victory....

Carbon dioxide and climate change will lower the quality of food in the future, claims a new study. Wheat, rice, maize and soybeans are key sources of nutrients for more than 2 billion people residing in poor countries. But with the rising amount of carbon dioxide in the air combined with climate change, nutrient level in crops is set to drop. The study was conducted by Harvard University researchers and colleagues who fear that several major crops - such as wheat and rice - with good nutrient value will have low levels of proteins and zinc in the future.

Skeletons of second world war soldiers are being washed from their graves by the rising Pacific Ocean as global warming leads to inundation of islands that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict. On the day Europe commemorated the 70th anniversary of the storming of Normandy beaches in the D-Day landings, a minister from the Marshall Islands, a remote archipelago between Hawaii and the Philippines, told how the remains of 26, probably Japanese soldiers, had been recovered so far on the isle of Santo. "There are coffins and dead people being washed away from graves; it's that serious,"...

President Obama warned Friday that storms like Hurricane Sandy will become more frequent as climate change intensifies. While being briefed by emergency response officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters, Obama urged the public to prepare now for this year's hurricane season. "The changes we’re seeing in our climate means that, unfortunately, storms like Sandy could end up being more common and more devastating," Obama said. "And that’s why we’re also going to be doing more to deal with the dangers of carbon pollution that help to cause this climate change and global warming. And that’s why we’re...

KATHMANDU, May 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - M ountaineering tourism in Nepal faces a threat from global warming as melting glaciers feed the risk of more deadly disasters such as the avalanche on Mount Everest that killed 16 people last month, scientists said on Tuesday. More than 2,000 foreign mountaineers flock to the Himalayan nation sandwiched between India and China each year, mainly to climb the world's highest mountain, generating revenue of $3.4 million in permit fees for the impoverished country. Rising global temperatures have shrunk the total area of Nepal's glaciers by almost a quarter between 1977 and 2010,...

WASHINGTON >> The devastating wildfires scorching Southern California offer a glimpse of a warmer and more fiery future, according to scientists and federal and international reports. In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it’s only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.

Washington (CNN) -- Flooded rail lines. Bigger, more frequent droughts. A rash of wildfires. Those are some of the alarming predictions in a White House climate change report released Tuesday, part of President Barack Obama's broader second-term effort to help the nation prepare for the effects of higher temperatures, rising sea levels and more erratic weather. "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," the National Climate Assessment says, adding that the evidence of man-made climate change "continues to strengthen" and that "impacts are increasing across the country." "Americans are noticing changes...

If you think Washington is scary now, consider this: Al Gore is not ruling out a 2016 run for president. Al Gore 2000 was awful, proving himself willing to divide the country and put it through hell during his attempt to sue his way into the White House. Al Gore 2016 would be many times worse. He would be a single-issue president, and that issue would be the total destruction of the economy in the name of the debunked global warming hoax.

Another insane cold wave — not the infamous “polar vortex ” but its evil twin — is bringing sub-zero and single-digit temperatures to much of the nation. And global warming may be even more extreme, and potentially more catastrophic, than climate scientists had feared. This is, of course, no contradiction. The rallying cry of the denialists — “It’s really cold outside, so global warming must be a crock!” — can be taken seriously only by those with a toddler’s limited conception of time and space. They forget that it’s winter, and apparently they don’t quite grasp that even when it’s...

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart. It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3....

The Golden Age of Antibiotics is Over!! Exclusive: Limited Time Coast to Coast Listeners... Sign Up Below to Get One of My Best Selling eBooks for FREE! Secure & Confidential WE GURANTEE YOUR PRIVACY. We hate spam as much as you do. For 60 years we have lived protected by these CURE ALL drugs. Lives have been saved… Billions of lives. True, there have been complications, but that's because of abuse, not because of the wonderful life-saving properties of antibiotics. But NOW it's over: Antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are spreading like wildfire. There are dozens of deadly antibiotic resistant...

Glenn Beck told his audience on Monday that the following morning on his radio program, he will reveal the name of a Republican lawmaker who said anyone who stands with FreedomWorks or the Senate Conservatives Fund is a “traitor” to the Senate.

Say what you will about us millennials—we’re a wilting bouquet of narcissistic, socialistic, overeducated, underemployed, tatted-up hipsters who still live at home—but, from this day forward, don’t you dare say we’re climate change deniers. A strong majority (66 percent!) of young independent voters, ages 18 to 34, accept as dogma that man and his dirty deeds are causing, and will continue to cause, climate change—this according to a study conducted by a bipartisan pair of political strategy groups for the League of Conservation Voters.

Wells dry up and underwater tables fall so fast in the Middle East and parts of India, China and the US that food supplies are seriously threatened, a leading resource analyst has warned. Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, claims that 18 countries, together containing half the world's people, are overpumping their underground water tables to the point – known as "peak water" – where they are not replenishing and where harvests are getting smaller each year. The situation is most serious in the Middle East. According to Brown: "Among the countries whose water supply has...

After five years of referring to climate change as a long-term climate and humanitarian problem, President Obama is trying a new strategy. In a speech Tuesday to sell a package of regulations to limit greenhouse gases from power plants, Obama will list the ways a warming planet impacts human health now, White House officials say. The strategy may have legs. The administration has directed several government agencies to work together on a wide-ranging effort to try to quantify the "social costs" of climate change, including health effects. How is climate change expected to affect human health? The Centers for Disease...

EXCERPT Lee’s argument is not based on the NSA or its monitoring of the nation’s communication. Rather, Lee said, there are indications that Roberts originally intended to vote against the act, but that a public “campaign of intimidation” made him change his mind. First, the senator claimed “the opinion was written in a way to suggest he switched his vote,” and that the dissenting opinion reads like it was originally written as the majority. He added that several news outlets reported that Roberts did change his vote, based on insider information. Not only that, he said, but the court performed...

Why must Republicans always play defense? Seemingly on the wrong side of any argument? Education; you? The pending sequester cuts have the President and his minions, like a flock of Chicken Littles, running to and fro, spinning tales of planes falling out of the sky. For some reason - whether they’re too polite, too incredulous or just too inept - I barely hear a peep from the loyal opposition. So I wrote this little story to help Republicans explain the scale of sequester cuts to their constituents and hopefully help them put things in perspective: George Finds Out He’s getting...

A new study by 22 biologists and ecologists has found that environmental changes on our planet are reaching a point of no return that leads to mass extinctions and harms human welfare. The situation, said one scientist, “scares the hell out of me.” That would be James H. Brown, one of the authors of alarming paper published by Nature, talking to New York Times Green blogger Justin Gillis. Brown is not one of your everyday cranks predicting raptures and the end of days. He is a macroecologist at the University of New Mexico. And as The Atlantic's James Fallows, who...

Beware of bubbles of false hope. Right now there is a lot of talk about how the U.S. economy is improving, but it is all a lie. The mainstream media can be very seductive. When you sit down to watch television your brain tends to go into a very relaxed mode. In such a state, it becomes easy to slip thoughts and ideas past your defenses. Sometimes when I am watching television I realize what the media is trying to do and yet I can still feel it happening to me. In this day and age, it is absolutely...

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Oops! I mean the sea is rising! The sea is rising! Such is the premise, chock full of laughable hysteria mixed in with premonitions of massive governmental spending based on a theory yet to be proven, in this Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel front page story by David Fleshler. As Chicken Little Fleshler describes, the plan to combat an unproven problem isn't just any plan, it's a BATTLE plan:

(Reuters) - Global temperature rise could exceed "safe" levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, two research papers published in the journal Nature warned. "Certain levels of climate change are very likely within the lifetimes of many people living now ... unless emissions of greenhouse gases are substantially reduced in the coming decades," said a study on Sunday by academics at the English universities of Reading and Oxford, the UK's Met Office Hadley Center and the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand."Large parts of...

Despite hysterical headlines of an “historic” storm: Irene is a Category 1 Hurricane By: Liz Berry Saturday August 27, 2011 7:44 am cross post from IfLizWereQueen The Truth of Irene’s Strength? –not nearly that of her related headlines for the past two days from the US media. Here is the latest report from the National Hurricane Center as of 6:03 AM Central Time and the hurricane still has not made landfall on the US shores. *Note: A Category 1 is the lowest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale before a storm is classified as a tropical storm. I guess they’ll have...

President Obama continues to push the notion that he wants a "balanced approach" to budget cuts, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the only spending cuts he is willing to contemplate are cuts in defense spending. The vast entitlement system that now eats the majority of tax dollars is, by contrast, not only on his list of programs to be sustained, but expanded. Mr. Obama seems determined to protect the welfare state. He lacks the courage and the candor to admit to the unsustainablity of an entitlement system which has pushed the nation to the brink of insolvency as...

(Reuters) - Polar bear cubs forced to swim long distances with their mothers as their icy Arctic habitat melts appear to have a higher mortality rate than cubs that didn't have to swim as far, a new study reports. Polar bears hunt, feed and give birth on ice or on land, and are not naturally aquatic creatures. Previous reports have noted individual animals swimming hundreds of miles (kilometers) to reach ice platforms or land, but this is one of the first to show these swims pose a greater risk to polar bear young.

Well, you can save your money and forget about buying that Prius. Because apparently cats, not cars, cause “climate change.” That’s the latest according to some research studies. The problem is reportedly due to a cat “epidemic” in the U.S., where the entire feline population has tripled in the last four decades to some 600 million furry critters. The studies report that “global warming” prompts cats to breed like, well, rabbits, and once there’s an “overpopulation,” our furry feline friends start killing off eco-saving birds en masse. Sounds like a lose, lose. Right? MotherJones reports:

Lufthansa, KLM Cancel Flights to Tokyo's Narita Airport Panicked passengers hoping to flee Japan waited for hours at the country's largest international airport today as concerns about radioactive fallout heightened. The international and domestic terminals at Narita International Airport were crammed with passengers leaving the capital Germany's Lufthansa airline became the first major carrier to cancel flights to irst major carrier to cancel flights to Narita International Airport, which services Tokyo, and will reroute all flights through Nagoya and Osaka, some 300 miles south of the capitol. Dutch carrier KLM followed. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said, "There is no...

Radiation Fears Lead to Potassium Iodide Hysteria Potassium Iodide Runs Low as Americans Seek It Out ..... The earthquake and tsunami in Japan has caused a slight meltdown in on of Japan's nuclear power plants and maybe some other potential meltdowns. Radiation levels in the area have increased, mostly affecting workers or those right near the plant. Radiation level increases in other parts of Japan are minimal most are blowing off to sea, which has sparked public hysteria on the West Coast of the United States. The public is terrified because they believe that the radiation levels will come to...